This week, several prime time television shows make their season debuts, and in some cases, their big premieres.  Yesterday morning, while flipping through the morning news programs, I caught a clip of NBC’s Today featuring a guest from the show Heroes.

I’ve never seen an episode of Heroes, because long before it premiered, I realized that it was going to be one of those shows that you have to watch too carefully…the kind you have to drop everything else for so that you can sit glued to the set so you won’t miss any important clue about some dramatic revelation.

(It’s entirely possible, since I’ve never seen the show, that I was wrong about that little guess.  But by now, it’s too late to just pick up in the middle, so it doesn’t matter any more.)

Anyway, this actor made the comment that he thought the long wait during summer hiatus — and in the case of Heroes, the wait was apparently much longer than that — was a good thing because it makes the fans just want the show that much more.

Nope.

Sorry.

Wrong.

The television viewer in me doesn’t buy that ridiculous argument for a second.  Waiting three months to see the next new episode of a show I like enough to make time to watch during the regular season doesn’t make me want that next episode more.  It makes me want to see what other shows are out there that have newer episodes available sooner.

A couple of seasons ago, I liked a show on USA Network called The 4400.  It was a science fiction series about 4,400 people who disappeared over a period of decades, then reappeared all at once from outer space with an agenda to dramatically change the world.  Some of the returning people seemed to have good motives, but all did not.

USA scheduled the show to air against traditional television seasons, so the show would have its “season” premiere in June or so, then run through the summer and wrap up that “season” in August.  By the time the following June rolled around, despite a ridiculous number of reruns of the few episodes that had been produced, you still had to go back and re-watch everything so you’d remember all of the little plotlines you were about to see advance in the next season.

It didn’t make me want to see the show that much more; in fact, waiting almost a full year to see a new episode since the cliffhanger the previous summer was almost enough to make me forget the show had ever been there.  I almost managed to miss one of the show’s season premieres because it didn’t occur to me to even look for it.  I happened to see a promo for it and realized it was that time of year.

Of course, the fact that The 4400 was a cable program says a lot about the traditional networks’ stubborn refusal to have a 52-week television season.  By taking summers off — and filling the summer months with that ridiculous reality crap — the networks just invite viewers to go elsewhere for entertainment.

And they hope that every September, when it’s time for premiere week, that those loyal viewers remember to come back and see what’s new.  They could afford to do that back when there were only three or four channels to choose from. But as competitive as the business is these days, with umpteen million channels out there hoping for your attention any time you pick up the remote, that three-month “downtime” just isn’t a good idea.

In the old days, a season was more than 30 weekly episodes.  There are some shows nowadays that seem generous if they manage to pop out 18 new shows in a given season.  And I’m not talking about the klunkers that get canceled after a few weeks.

It’s time the networks do away with the end of the season and keep new shows on all year round.  If they have to force limited-run series like Biggest Loser and Survivor into the mix, that’s fine; just give one or two shows a breather now and then to make room for them.  That’s still better than putting all of your regular programs on rerun patrol.  Then I’d have no reason to hunt down new shows when my favorites have nothing new for me.

The only show I’m looking forward to seeing is CSI:, the original one, not the Miami or New York versions, to see what happens with Warrick’s apparent murder.  (I’m pretty sure the character is being killed off, because it looked like he had sustained injuries that would not lend themselves to a “miracle recovery” in the season finale.  The promo I saw the other day indicated that CSI: doesn’t return until the first week or so of October, so it’s that much longer I have to wait around to see what happens next.  And it’s that much longer that I have to stew about it.

How about you?  Any shows you’re eagerly awaiting this season?  How would you feel about the networks killing the “summer vacation” scheduling plan?  Would you be more likely to get into a show that would offer more new episodes year-round?